Since the rising problem inside our environment involves drinking water contamination and detrimental normal water, which mainly occurs due to the cleansing away of fertilizers. However there are two different types of fertilizers: Organic and natural and Inorganic fertilizers, both of many types, with different results. Thus, I decided to research upon this question: "How is the effect of the nitrogen and phosphorus ions in organic and natural fertilizers different from the effect of nitrogen and phosphorus ions within inorganic fertilizers on the environment, regarding their contribution in normal water contamination and air reduction?" I am going to analyze how the aftereffect of the nitrogen and phosphorus ions on the environment is different when they are in organic and natural fertilizers compared to the circumstance when they are contained in inorganic fertilizers. We can make our evaluation based on their respective efforts in water contamination and oxygen reduction.
To carry out this research, first of all I had to learn what causes air reduction in this, and how it is triggered. Then I possessed to check whether also to what amount the fertilizers could be responsible for oxygen reduction. Furthermore I had to determine that where fertilizer water bacteria could convert to their nutrients better. This complete research led me to summary that natural (organic) fertilizers are much better than inorganic ones, because inorganic fertilizers have significantly more amounts of phosphates and nitrate ions, that are the main causes of deoxygenation of drinking water.
To understand the topic and write this short article, I did comprehensive analysis of the available resources, including relevant websites, Wikipedia, and the publicized articles and a few catalogs covering this issue. I also gained some information while in dialogue with my supervisor and conducted an experiment for main data. I also used a few catalogs for the study.
Introduction:
Importance of Water
Water is an important element which we need in our daily lives. It's the basic need of every living thing. We utilize it for different purposes, such as drinking, cooking food, cleaning, farming, while companies use huge amounts of it of computer to create products. A lot of the drinking water we use is fresh water; however 97% of the Earth's drinking water is saltwater. The rest being fresh, comes in the form of Surface drinking water (streams, lakes and streams), ground drinking water (springs), and mainly glaciers and ice caps. Fresh normal water can also obtained by a process called desalination, in which salt drinking water is converted to fresh water; however because this technique is very costly ("Water Resources, " 2013, para. 2), we tend to use water from other different and natural sources of fresh normal water, especially the surface water.
Fresh water, however, is becoming less and less clean. It is being contaminated in a number of various ways, such as professional misuse being drained into drinking water, DDT being sprayed into water for infestations control reasons, and the operating from fertilizers in this particular systems. Ongley (1996) mentioned that the statistical studies conducted by Czechoslovakia found agriculture as the solo most significant contributor, with a talk about of 48%, of the overall pollution of the surface normal water (p. 3).
Consequences of Water Pollution:
This pollution of normal water results in hazardous effects to the environment and individuals health. As normal water becomes deoxygenated and polluted, marine life is influenced and many of it dies. People also drink that water, therefore do their livestock which can have adverse health effects on both because they are subjected to different chemicals.
Types of fertilizers:
There are two main types of fertilizers: Organic and Inorganic. Organic being natural roots of either vegetable or animal, while inorganic being produced through chemical substance processes or originated from minerals. (International Grain Research Institute, 2009).
Fertilizers are used in certain quantities for agriculture to increase crop produce and for healthy growth. However excess sums can be leached off and drained into the surface drinking water and /or groundwater. This triggers problems such as eutrophication which results in algal blooms and later lack of oxygen in drinking water which really is a danger for aquatic life and the later users of the water. The primary the different parts of both Organic and Inorganic fertilizers are Nitrogen and Phosphorus, however inorganic fertilizers have handled levels of specific ions, whereas in organic fertilizers the amount/ levels of every ingredient varies and has different ions available in it.
In next portion of this report, I'll give a evaluation of the both types of fertilizers mentioned previously in terms of the impact on the environment. In particular, I will find how the effect of the nitrogen and phosphorus ions in organic fertilizers (in particular potting soil/ compost and manure) is different from the result of nitrogen and phosphorus ions within inorganic fertilizers (NPK) on the environment, regarding their contribution in drinking water contamination and air reduction?"
For this article I am first going to find direct effect of bacterias on water and exactly how it especially plays a part in the deoxygenation of water. To become able to find that out, I carried out an experiment.
Design:
What is the effect on the BOD (Biological Oxygen Demand) of distilled drinking water when cared for with organic or inorganic fertilizer directly?
Hypothesis:
The DO attentiveness less for inorganic fertilizers than organic fertilizers, as organic and natural fertilizers have a tendency to settle down and also have less amounts of nutrition in them when compared with inorganic fertilizers. So more bacteria will take in more nutrients from the inorganic fertilizer, and therefore more respiration will take place, leading to the deoxygenation of normal water.
Control Factors:
The mass of the fertilizers (in grams) was a control varying, therefore is the amount of drinking water (volume in ml). I needed 1. 5 grams of fertilizer, and this was stuffed to brim of the flasks. The control heat range was around 30.
Dependent variable:
The dependent changing in this test was the Dissolved air (DO) attentiveness in this inflatable water after the fertilizer have been added.
Independent varying:
The independent variables are the fertilizers. I am going to be contrasting their effect on the water and its deoxygenation.
Apparatus:
- Conical flasks (4) [500ml]
- Organic Fertilizer, compost
- Inorganic Fertilizer, NPK(14:14:14)
- DO detectors (options in mg/L)
- Data logger
- Distilled water
- Measuring balance
- Corks (4)
- Beaker [500 ml]
Procedure:
First I setup the DO sensor and data logger and devote the beaker filled with distilled water for warming up. We must keep it in there for ten minutes before having the ability to get the ultimate result. We will use this value as the control value.
First I put a piece of cells on the measuring balance. Then I calibrate the calculating balance to zero. I QUICKLY add the inorganic fertilizer on top of the cells till it reads 1. 5 grams. Then I add the fertilizer into one of the flasks.
I do the same for another 1. 5 grams of organic and natural and for just two 1. 5 grams of inorganic fertilizers.
Then I fill up all the conical flasks to brim with distilled drinking water (to make sure no air is still left trapped). Then I stirred this particular in the flask to combine the fertilizer as properly as you can. Then I required the DO measurement of the distilled water by stirring the DO sensor in the beaker filled with water. I QUICKLY stirred the DO sensor into the flasks to take down the initial readings.
Then I put the cork on and place every one of the flasks in the cupboard. That is done to prevent the bacteria from having sunlight, this to avoid algal growth in normal water (so that no photosynthesis occurs, and no air is produced; which is performed to determine the value of air depleted). The control drinking water in beaker is also placed into the dark.
Then I got the ultimate reading of all the flasks five days later, to check on how much oxygen each of computer got lost. I exposed the corks and create the DO sensor, that is warmed it up for 10 minutes in a beaker of distilled drinking water).
Then I got down the ultimate DO focus of this particular in each flask.
The time taken up to do this experiment was 20 minutes, plus five minutes for unscrambling stuff, excluding the 5 days and nights. So, in total the time considered was 5 days and 50 minutes. Also we've to be sure that when we mix the sensor in each flask or beaker, we must clean sensor before adding it in the other.
Data collection and processing:
As we can see by assessing these graph that the common final value is way less than the average DO value needed for this particular. The DO value needed for drinking water to be secure is 7. 56 mg/L at 30. However, normal water experiencing hypoxia (dangerously low level of dissolved and thus is not able to support life) has to have a DO value below 2 mg/L. This feature can only just be known in the flasks that covered the organic fertilizers. The other flasks also experienced a decrease in the DO concentration, nevertheless the change was not as significant as that of the organic and natural fertilizer, and it certainly will not show indicators of hypoxia. We are able to also notice from the graphs that the some of the oxygen is also lost by natural means, but it isn't a very large amount and it usually maintains its balance.
Conclusion and Evaluation:
What is the effect on the BOD (biological Air Demand) of distilled water when treated with organic and natural or inorganic fertilizer immediately?
As we can easily see that the results are completely opposite to that of the Hypothesis. I hypothesized that the inorganic fertilizer would lead to lessen concentrations of DO, somewhat the organic and natural one. Actually, an opposite style was witnessed. This test shows little support for my hypothesis. There could many reasons for this, but the basic and main reason could be presence of bacterias in the compost itself. The compost may already be present with a lot of bacteria and therefore due to abundance of bacterias, more nutrition and food was used and it was used faster (It had been consumed faster due to amount of competition was more and they were fighting for success reasons). With the consumption of food by so many bacteria, more respiration took place and thus more air was consumed. This might have been the main of oxygen decrease in this particular. Also in the flask formulated with inorganic fertilizers, there have been fewer bacteria, creating there to be enough food and therefore the oxygen usage had not been as low.
Another reason might be that they weren't put under normal conditions and also that there is very little time to check on for all different conditions over an extended time frame. That would have given us greater results. For instance, if we had also put two more test flasks out in the open that would show us algal development, increase in air and then its cut down. This would have given us the more appropriate result. Secondly they are the results of the result of fertilizers on water. Fertilizers aren't directly tossed into water. These are leached involved with it. So we do nearly understand how much is leached in to the water and that's another factor that is required to be looked at.
So it seems, in the short-term, organic fertilizers contribute a lot more to the deoxygenation of water than inorganic fertilizer (considering that no photosynthesis has occurred, and/or no sunlight has been given).
As mentioned already, fertilizers are not thrown in to the lakes and/or normal water bodies immediately. They are put onto the land with the purpose of providing the crops, or fields with appropriate nutrients, to be able to ensure good crop yield and healthy vegetation. This however contributes to the leaching of the fertilizer, this is the fertilizer is drained into the water bodies. This means that leaching is straight proportional to solubility of the thing.
We are also well aware that farmers usually apply the areas' land with drinking water, with the unusual exception of infrequent urine sprays. In the case of the uncommon exception they still use water and use urine occasional rather than regularly. As we know, organic compounds aren't soluble in polar fluids even though inorganic materials are.
This implies that due to water being truly a polar chemical substance, inorganic fertilizer is easier leached into the water body. This thereby escalates the risk of this bodies being more contaminated through inorganic than inorganic. Relating to Inckel (1999), compost takes on a big part increasing the ground quality, making the more able to retain drinking water. (p. 41-42) Which means that less water is leached credited to more normal water being retained, which does mean that organic fertilizer is leached in to the drinking water body.
However, farmers largely tend to use inorganic fertilizers to obtain quicker results and higher yields, as inorganic can be easily applied while using the organic does take time. Obviously a fertilizer needs to be soluble in order for the vegetation to have the ability to ingest it.
So therefore when compost is applied on to the soil, bacteria decompose it gradually, releasing the nutrition. That's why compost is supposed to be held wet, so that as soon as the nutrients are released they could be ingested by the plant quickly. This gradual process of nutrients being released ensures that fewer nutrition are leached away, because when the nutrients will be released from the inorganic substance, they might be directly taken in by the flower, as the process of decomposition is slow-moving. Also if it some is leached, it would be hardly any, quite an insignificant amount. Because as the nutrients are slowly but surely released in organic and natural fertilizers, and crops are in constant need of nutrients, they might quickly absorb the little that is produced because of the slow decomposition of the materials, therefore there is a lesser chance of the nutrients being leached away.
While, on the other palm, inorganic fertilizers are quickly leached because they don't have to be decomposed and when in contact with water, a few of it is consumed by the seed, while some is leached away.
This shows that inorganic fertilizers tend to be prone to being leached into the water systems, thus being more of a danger to this inflatable water.
Also according to my research question I will be looking specifically at the result of Phosphorus and Nitrogen compounds of every fertilizer on the normal water.
In order to do that, first I am going to describe how and what can cause the waters contamination and/ or decrease in air. "Water becomes polluted when contaminants such as fertilizers are discharged in to the water, without enough treatment to remove them" ("Water Pollution, " 2013, para. 1). Normal water can be polluted by fertilizers through many ways, but happens mainly through leaching. Then comes the process of eutrophication.
In this technique, the water bodies are enriched with excessive nutrients, causing an overgrowth in the plant life and algal blooms. As algal blooms and water plants increase great amounts of oxygen can be used up. This therefore triggers a decrease in the quantity of oxygen. Soon when they expire, the bacterias decompose them and more oxygen is used up (Mackean, 2002, p. 238). This causes this inflatable water to be deoxygenated.
The condition of hypoxia occurs when the water has too low oxygen levels, usually at the quantity of 2mg/L. (Committee on Environment and Natural Resources, 2000).
We know that in water, formerly, phosphate and nitrate ions happen in smaller amounts and algae only need small amount to endure. However, when given increased levels of nutrients, they have more to feed on, thus resulting in their development and then they multiply.
"At sea level, typical DO concentrations in 100-percent saturated fresh normal water will range between 7. 56 mg/L (or 7. 56 parts oxygen in 1, 000, 000 parts water) at 30 degrees Low dissolved air (DO) mainly results from high algae growth induced by phosphorus. Nitrogen is another nutrient that can donate to algae progress. As the algae perish and decompose, the process consumes dissolved oxygen. , a zone of less than 2 ppm of DO covers a location about how big is NJ for a lot of the entire year, where aquatic life can't survive. The condition is primarily triggered by excessive nutrients, generally nitrogen and phosphorus" ("Integrated Assessment of Hypoxia in the Northern Gulf coast of florida, " 2009, p. 1-2).
Due to this reference we can conclude that excess nitrogen and phosphorus are the key causes of air depletion in normal water. In addition, it shows at normal levels water would contain about 7. 56 mg/L DO at 30 certifications in water, while also implying that contaminated and deoxygenated normal water would contain less than 2 ppm of DO.
The question that develops next is what levels of phosphorus and nitrogen ions are needed in order to cause water to be deoxygenated or polluted?
According to the Fish-pond Ecosystem Section 3 of the Guide to Ideal Pond Dynamics (2008), in the section Nutrient levels, for a drinking water body to be contaminated phosphate levels have to attain 0. 05 to 0. 01 ppm and /or nitrates have to be about 5 to 7 ppm for the water to be contaminated (para. 1). This also implies that phosphorus is more of the cause of algal blooms. This shows that even the addition of a little phosphorus can cause low levels of oxygen in water, although it also shows the addition of some nitrogen could be dangerous too.
Now we can look and compare the ideals of average phosphorus and nitrogen content in organic and inorganic fertilizer to be able to investigate which would be higher cause in the production of algal blooms. Regarding to Resources of Nitrogen for Organic and natural Farms (n. d. ), the utmost amount of nitrogen chicken manure compost can have is 4%. The maximum amount of phosphate is also 4% (Walls-Thumma, n. d. , para. 2).
According to the meals and Agriculture Business of United Nations [FAOUN] (n. d. ), minimum amount amount of Nitrogen substance in the NPK fertilizer would be 15%, while the minimum phosphate level would be 15. 2%.
As we can easily see there is about 2. 5 times the amount of each ingredient in inorganic fertilizer than in the organic and natural fertilizer. This means that the result of the inorganic fertilizer would be than that of organic and natural fertilizer.
We can easily see that as anticipated to presenting no retaining talents like the organic fertilizer, and scheduled being more easily leached and having higher levels of nitrogen and phosphorus levels,
Inorganic fertilizers are a larger cause of water contamination, algal blooms and therefore the oxygen decrease in water.
